Format/reinstall of Vista fails at a blue screen

Super Moderator

..did this because Vista was acting strangely following the aborted Linux attempt. It gets almost all the way to the final point and then a brief blue screen saying something about unable to upload driver or something similar. The it reverts back.
What do you suggest? Unplug everything except wired mouse/keyboard and monitor like I used to do for XP?

It hasn't happened on previous reinstallations except perhaps I have a new Bluetooth dongle added since then - for my Motorola cellphone synching - do you think that might be the culprit?
I'm installing it from C:\Windows XP so that I can keep my partition letters as they are when tuned into Vista, nothing I haven't already done, successfully.

Super Moderator

It was only on screen for about 1 second. I've tried a couple of times since and installation just fails and winds back without a blue screen.
I've unplugged Bluetooth and MSFT Lifecam, the next thing will be external hard drive perhaps.
Losing patience with it right now so may wait until tomorrow for the next attempt.

Super Moderator

It may possibly be something to do with my video card...although nothing is different from previous successful installations.
I searched online and found that it is recorded in the "setupapi.dev.log" which is miles long, but I have kept a copy.

Tried it now 5 times - doing exactly what I did on the successful occasions - no good. I formatted the partition each time.

Super Moderator

No, not as far as I can see and I even tried the copy I made when I first got it - same result.
When I do the Vista compatibility check it passes me with flying colours which is something I cannot understand.
My A/V wouldn't interfere would it? It didn't in the past. I was always amazed how easy Vista installed and now ..... ??!!
There have been some posts at various forums with exactly the same problem, but with the x64 version.

Super Moderator

The root of the problem was that my desktop has a nice 512Mb ATI Radeon X1600 PRO, however when installing Windows Vista RTM the drivers for this card that Microsoft kindly include are version 7.14 dated 21/8/2006, whereas the drivers on ATI’s site are 8.31 dated 2/11/2006. The 7.12 driver appear to cause the Vista install to hang on the driver being loaded; this promptly caused a blue screen of death. This then snowballed into the next problem; the blue screen on appears for about 1-2 seconds before the PC reboots attempting to continue with the installation. The only words I managed to read during this time period was “driver in infinite loop” or similar, which isn’t exactly very helpful. I eventually got Vista installed, but only by following these steps:

Replace the X1600 video card with the original Dell video card - NVIDIA g-Force 2 MX.
Install Windows Vista
Re-install the X1600 PRO video card.
On Vista starting, it will kindly detect the new video card, and install the old drivers supplied by Microsoft - there doesn’t appear to be a simple way to cancel this install, so if you reboot after this, then Vista will blue screen again, and you will have to go into Safe Mode and remove the graphics cards
Install the latest ATI drivers

It's Microsoft's fault. They are always behind in drivers and Vista insists on installing them of course. The previous driver from ATI caused many BSOD's world-wide and ATI had to issue a patch for it.
So I'm now going to put my old video card in and have a go.

Super Moderator

Yes it does make sense. There was a huge hullabaloo about a previous ATI driver which they had to patch, but it only affected certain cards. Well, it appears that Vista installation manager tries to install that very one (naturally) which sends the installer into a loop.
I suppose if I had selected don't update at the beginning it might have been avoided.. Anyway, it's instralled now and am in the process of updating ATI drivers yet again for my newer video card which is back in.